North to Alaska (remaster)

Two Laplanders wearing traditional dress milking reindeer, Port Clarence, Alaska,1900

Big Sam left Seattle in the year of ’92

With George Pratt his partner and brother Billy too

They crossed the Yukon River and found a bonanza gold

Below that old white mountain, just a little southeast of Nome

Sam crossed the majestic mountains to the valleys far below

He talked to his team of huskies as he mushed on through the snow

With the Northern Lights a runnin’ wild in the Land of the Midnight Sun

Yes, Sam McCord was a mighty man in the year of nineteen-one

By the end of the short-lived Klondike and Alaskan gold rushes of the late 1890s, the far northwest of the North American continent had been changed irrevocably.

Over 100,000 prospectors had swarmed like a plague of locusts over the Yukon Territory and Alaska, bringing everything from pack animals to industrial river dredging machinery with them.

Entire virgin forests were clear-felled along rivers to make boats for transporting equipment.  More timber went to building shanty towns, boardwalks, and sluices.

The rest was firewood.

Fish, birds, and other wildlife was exterminated along entire river systems – rivers, streams, and creeks which had been muddied and polluted by industrialised mining, while thousands upon thousands of other wild animals were shot-out or trapped-out to feed miners and other gold rush opportunists.

Tailors, blacksmiths, guides, carpenters, cooks, saloon-keepers, criminals, pimps, and of course, prostitutes…

If the fictional character “Sam McCord” had really visited Nome, Alaska in “the year of nineteen-one”, he would have seen a place which had sprung from nothing into a town of over 20,000 people in only a few months.

He would have rubbed shoulders with writers like Jack London, and drank in taverns like “The Dexter”, owned by the likes of Wyatt Earp – yes, Wyatt Earp of Tombstone, Arizona – erstwhile pimp, gambler, and “lawman” for hire.

Many of the local faces seen by prospectors all over Alaska might easily have been taken for being native people, but a great number of these “locals” were in fact Filipino sailors and their families. While Filipinos had been arriving in Alaska as crew on Spanish ships since the 1700s (with many intermarrying among local tribes), they began to arrive in even greater numbers after the USA’s takeover of The Philippines in 1898. It would be such Filipino crewmen who would lay the first communications cables between Alaska and Seattle in 1903.

By the time most of the prospectors had upped-sticks and left for warmer climes after the gold rush, local tribes such as the Han, Tagish, Tutchone, and Tlingit had been left reeling – from disease, the introduction of alcohol into their communities, and worst of all, the breakdown of old trade networks and the near extermination of much wildlife in many areas – wildlife which had traditionally sustained them for centuries, for millennia.

Added to this catastrophe was the 19th century Pacific whaling industry, which did for indigenous coastal dwellers what gold miners had done to the northwestern interior.

*****

Enter a Coast Guard captain from Georgia named Michael Healy – runaway son of a slaveholding Irishman from County Roscommon and his “consort” Mary Eliza Clark – an enslaved woman who was eventually freed.

Healy, a man beset by his own demons and no stranger to the bottle, nonetheless saw the hungry and impoverished plight of the Alaskan Inuit, and being a fundamentally decent man, determined to help them in some way.

Long story short, having seen the reindeer herders of Siberia on his many travels aboard ship, Michael Healy suggested to Dr. Sheldon Jackson, the Commissioner of Education in Alaska and a Presbyterian minister, that the Coast Guard might replenish devastated wildlife stocks by transporting entire herds of Siberian reindeer to Alaska by sea.

The Inuit might be taught to become self-sufficient herdsmen rather than hunters, the reasoning went.

Jackson bought into the idea, and funds for the project were raised through private and government sources.

The first reindeer arrived, with Siberian herdsmen brought to Alaska as instructors.  These Siberians soon departed due to cultural differences with the Inuit.

And so began one of the strangest episodes of immigration in American history.

Families and groups of Sámi people from Scandinavia (the people formerly known as “Laplanders”), reindeer experts par excellence, were brought to Alaska instead.

Sami reindeer herder Ellen Sara holding her baby sister, Berit, Alaska, circa 1906

This time all parties got on well, the project took proper root, and the Alaska Reindeer Service was born.

Perhaps the natural amity between Sámi and Inuit should surprise no one, as the Sámi, just like indigenous Americans, had experienced ethnic discrimination and cultural genocide in their rightful and ancient circumpolar homelands.

The attitude of the immigrant Siberian reindeer to all of this remains unclear…

*****

“North to Alaska” was the theme song to a 1960 film of the same name starring John Wayne, and became a major hit for country and rockabilly singer Johnny Horton.

Horton would be killed in a head-on car collision with a truck shortly before the film’s release, and never got to enjoy the film or song’s success.

His friend Johnny Cash would do a reading at his funeral.

The film “North to Alaska”, like so many other Hollywood period pieces, is a decades-later romantic reimagining of events on the US American frontier, based on a 1939 book by Ladislas Fodor, an urban-dwelling Hungarian-Jewish immigrant.

The prostitutes are all “hookers with hearts of gold”, and the prospectors are just rough-edged “gentlemen” in disguise – with nary a mention of environmental rapine, knife fights, brutal pimps and laudanum addiction…

Amusingly, the song’s lyric writer shows a blind spot for geography in his mention of “that old white mountain, just a little southeast of Nome”.

Since Nome is situated directly on the coast, “a little southeast of Nome” would place a person smack dab in the Northern Pacific Ocean.

Unless, of course, by “a little southeast” they meant “that old white mountain” called Denali lying about 450 miles southeast of Nome.

In “the year of nineteen-one”, this mountain was known by local gold prospectors as “Mount McKinley”, in honor of the US president at the time.

William McKinley was also “a mighty man in the year of nineteen-one”, having won re-election the year before on a platform supporting US imperialism and the introduction of huge trade tariffs.

McKinley’s last address, at 1901 Pan-American Expo in Buffalo, New York

On September 14 “in the year of nineteen-one”, the mighty McKinley met an assassin’s bullet, and that was that…

*****

Postscript

The current US president is a huge self-declared fan of McKinley, piling-on the tariffs, and even going so far as to sign an executive order seeking to place McKinley‘s name back on the mountain the locals prefer to call “Denali“.

He has also, of course, attempted to impose a renaming of the Gulf of Mexico – a plan with its own problems.

You see, the year before Johnny Horton recorded “North to Alaska”, he had scored a hit with a song called “The Battle of New Orleans”, a chirpy jingoistic celebration of an American war which actually ended in a stalemate.

It is exactly the sort of song which appeals to the current incumbent’s base:

In 1814 we took a little trip

Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip

We took a little bacon and we took a little beans

And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans

We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’

There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago

We fired once more and they began to runnin’

On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico…

I suppose Jason Aldean, Ted Nugent, or Kid Rock will come up with a solution.

[Original article published 2023, updated Mar 2025]